Thursday, April 26, 2007

Review of Dali by The City Paper

I could try and spin it that it is all good, but you can all read Trey's complaints about the script on your own time. What I take away is the affirmation that this show is designed to the nines and the performances are superb!Here are some choice bits. (I will post a link to the whole review tomorrow.)

Jose Rivera's slow, sultry, metaphor-drunk moonlight rhapsody turns out on closer inspection to be an embarrassment of rich langauge wrapped around a lean, hard core, and when it's not overdoing the poetic flights, it's a painful human portrait of two once-intimate people trying desperately to stay connected.

The superb-on-a-budget design helps keep things interesting, though, and so do muscular, thoughtful, and above all emotionally complex performances from the two-some at the play's core. Price and Fernandez-Coffey both manage to seem damaged and dangerous by turns, with just enough in the way of neediness and weariness and stoppered anger to help keepp the evening keep the evening feeling unpredicatble from moment to moment.

. . . a reminder courtesy of a playwright who's got fever-dreams in his blood, that the collision of passion and cold, hard reality can leave you bruised under all the blush.